Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

Suppose that you own a rowboat and enjoy going rowing on a nearby lake in the summer. In June, you are planning to go rowing with two of your friends (three people total in the boat), and in July, you are planning to go rowing with just one friend (two people total in the boat). Will you put in more effort (row harder) on the three-person trip or on the two-person trip?

Dr. Hurtado and Dr. Yashari have recently conducted a study and found a positive correlation between music-listening and dancing ability: People who listen to lots of music tend to be excellent dancers. The correlation is statistically significant. Can they conclude that listening to music causes people to be better dancers? Why or why not?

If you conduct a study and predict that excessive computer use causes social awkwardness, then social awkwardness is the ____________________ variable.

There is a moderately strong, positive relationship between different forms of prejudice: People who are prejudiced against Group X also tend to be prejudiced against Group Y. Given this information, we should expect the correlation between anti-Jewish prejudice and anti-Asian prejudice to be about ____.

Explain the self-correcting nature of science.

If a researcher conducts an experiment in which the independent variable is poorly defined (i.e., has a poor operational definition), then the experiment can be said to have ____.

In social psychology, researchers typically test hypotheses using the ____ confidence level.

According to the simile in your text, if psychology is like a tree, then social psychology is like ____.

The study of how people change across their lives from conception to death is the purview of ____.

Behaviorism seeks to explain human behavior in terms of ____.

A(n) ____ is someone who works for a researcher by serving as an "actor" in the research (e.g., pretending to be another research participant, and being mean to other research participants in order to see how participants respond to meanness).

Social psychologists usually derive their hypotheses from existing theories.

In social psychology, the "ABC triad" consists of ____.

Which of the following would be the BEST operational definition for tiredness?

Research studies that withhold information from participants or intentionally mislead them about the purpose of the study are referred to as ____ studies.

The term "reactance" is used to refer to the tendency for people to ____.

Suppose that you are conducting a research project for a social psychology class. Due to the fact that you have no budget for the research, you are forced to rely on a college student population. How big of a problem is this in terms of your ability to later generalize your findings to other groups of people?

Dr. Zink and Dr. Vasquez are designing a new study. They have come up with a good hypothesis for the study, but they are having trouble thinking of operational definitions for their variables. In other words, they are concerned that their research might be low in ____.

Zhao's research interest is to determine if poverty causes one to be more politically liberal. However, he cannot randomly assign people to conditions of poverty versus wealth because (aside from the practical difficulty) it would be unethical to do so. Zhao will have to ____.

Most social psychologists perform research by ____.